Yumo Railway functions as a crucial part of the central line of Trans-Asian Railway from Kunming to Bangkok. It also spreads out the line of important international railway passages from Yunnan Province and even China reaching Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian countries. Yumo Railway has a total length of 507.4 kilometers, including 93 tunnels with a total length of 367.87 kilometers. The longest tunnel has a length of 17.476 kilometers. Due to the semi-closed narrow space with long distances in the tunnels, the evacuation condition is rather limited once the fire disaster occurs or potentially looms. The fire may spread along with the cables in the tunnel, which will seriously threaten the lives of people. Therefore, telecommunication optical cables for tunnels have special requirements for the flame-retardant performance and the amount of smoke generated by combustion.

Conventional flame-retardant optical cables are generally gel-filled, which are widely used in domestic railways. This kind of optical cable contains the tube filling gel or the cable filling gel, which will decrease the flame retardancy and will release a certain amount of dense smoke. There will be hazards during personnel escaping or rescuing when a fire occurs if the conventional flame-retardant optical cable is used in closed spaces such as tunnels, and the safety is relatively low.

Recently, FiberHome won the bid for Yumo Railway Optical Cable Procurement Project and customized a fully dry flame-retardant optical cable called "Gel-free Optical Cable" for Yumo Railway. The customized cable product uses dry water-blocking materials instead of the high-smoke filling gels in the loose tube and the cable core of the optical cable, which not only improves the flame-retardant performance of the optical cable but also greatly reduces the smoke generated by the optical cable when it encounters a fire. It is discovered that the light rate resulted from the smoke increased by 40% after using the new customized optical cable. Besides, the fully dry flame-retardant optical cable is easier to peel during cable construction and connection, and no gel will flow out to pollute the construction environment, and there is no need to clean the gel and no additional garbage shall be generated, which makes the cable construction process eco-friendly. Meanwhile, the optical cable is free of wiping, which can greatly save time and reduce construction costs when making joints and connections. In addition, the weight of the optical cable is reduced by an average of 10% per kilometer, which makes the transportation and construction of cables in the tunnel more convenient and efficient.   

The use of fully dry flame-retardant optical cables on Yumo Railway has created a precedent for the application of this product in national railways, helping shorten the construction period of the project, making the construction of telecommunication cables efficiently and eco-friendly, and providing a stronger guarantee for the safety of tunnel lines. At the same time, with its excellent characteristics, fully dry flame-retardant optical cables can not only be used for railway tunnels and subway telecommunications, but also have a broad market and use-value in densely populated areas such as urban CBDs, commercial venues, and high-rise buildings. As a state-owned key enterprise in the field of optical telecommunications, FiberHome will continue to innovate, endow with our mission, and provide more excellent product solutions to help China's economy develop better and faster.